The present invention relates generally to floating point processors, and, more particularly, to the forcing of corner cases in a rounder portion of a floating point processor.
A binary floating point processor (“BFP”) includes a rounder that receives its input from the normalizer component of the BFP. As the normalizer shift amount is computed by a leading zero anticipator, the normalizer result is either correctly normalized or it may need a shift correction by one bit. When a corner case occurs such as, for example, a disabled overflow exception, the fraction or significand result of the rounder is forced or rounded to either infinity or the largest representable number (“Xmax”) with the appropriate plus or minus sign. Whether infinity or Xmax needs to be forced depends on the sign of the fraction result and the current rounding mode. To force the fraction to infinity, the fraction may be forced to all zeros. To force the fraction to Xmax, the fraction may be forced to all ones.